Aberration compensation in two-dimensional reflective optical systems

Abstract

We present a novel approach to minimize aberrations in imaging systems. The energy distributions at the source and target of an optical system play a crucial role in designing freeform surfaces through illumination optics methodologies. We quantify the on-axis and off-axis aberrations using a merit function that depends on the energy distributions. The minimization of the merit function yields optimal energy distributions, which subsequently enable us to design freeform reflector surfaces that cause the least aberrations. We validate our method by testing it for two configurations, a single-reflector system with a parallel source to a near-field target, and a double-reflector system with a parallel source to a point target.